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This week, Kristian Andreassen, VP of Product Development at Conception Nurseries, joins the Cannabis Equipment News podcast to discuss why breeders should be paid royalties, how he is reverse engineering legacy genetics and the best strain he's ever seen.
Kristian Andreassen has been in the cannabis industry for about 20 years. After growing up in upstate New York, he moved to California for college, where he noticed a few friends getting involved in the cannabis industry. At the time, Andreassen was a professional snowboarder and used cannabis for pain management. It was also around the same time as the birth of Proposition 215, which permitted the use of medical cannabis in the state.
Andreassen started a small grow; he had four lights in a spare bedroom, and his first two attempts failed miserably. But things started picking up with the third harvest.
Andreassen says he had to earn his green thumb. With an engineering background, he thought growing cannabis was as simple as managing inputs and outputs, but by his third grow attempt, he learned how to read and understand the plant.
After 20 years, the industry has evolved, and Andreassen says strains are now more coveted than ever before as the industry demands differentiation. About two years ago, Andreassen joined Conception Nurseries, where he is now the vice president of product development.
At Conception, Andreassen is focused on the importance of tissue culture technology, using it to preserve genetics, restore old genetics and, perhaps most importantly, pay breeders royalties.
Still, the current cannabis market is all about hype strains, and Andreassen says the name game is running rampant with some strains simply being renamed, which is why he stresses the importance of mapping the genome so operators can know more about each strain's origin.
Andreassen admits it is hard to keep up with the changes in the market. When Conception starts working with a cultivar, it takes a year for the strain to become commercially viable. Conception works with breeders, specifically the trendsetters with a good pulse on the industry, and asks them to hold a strain back for a year of development. At first, it's difficult, but breeders are starting to see the value in licensing genetics — and working with a firm that will pay them on time.
Andreassen adds that R&D is costly, with considerable time and money sunk into strain development. He stresses the importance of IP protection for breeders.
Andreassen has created several award-winning strains over the last 20 years, but perhaps the one he covets most is Blue Andeze, made from a mix of two of his most beloved strains, DJ Short Blueberry and Thin Mint GSC.
Jump around:
- What happened after receiving some of the first licenses in Sacramento. (9:12)
- Starting at Conception Nurseries. (11:13)
- How Conception Nurseries pays royalties to breeders. (15:34)
- Picking the right strains for the menu. (16:12)
- How strains lost their original lineage. (18:39)
- Reverse engineering to recover lost strains. (20:52)
- Problems with strain authenticity. (27:44)
- How rescheduling will change clone and tissue propagation. (34:15)
- The best strain that he's ever seen. (38:07)
Please make sure to like, subscribe and share the podcast. You could also help us out by giving the podcast a positive review. Finally, to email the podcast or suggest a potential guest, you can reach David Mantey at [email protected].
